Pao had started out on the fast track, but as she had been
promoted she failed to perform. Thus, she was not made a senior partner and was
eventually let go.

Currently, she is interim CEO of Reddit.

Among the more interesting sidelights of the Pao saga is her
husband, Alfonse “Buddy” Fletcher.

A husband’s actions do not necessarily reflect on his wife,
and vice versa, but, one is known for the company one keeps, and Buddy Fletcher
has more than a few problems of his own. Apparently, his business dealings have
been less than honest.

A
Manhattan judge has ruled that the 49-year-old investor owes his former law
firm $2.7 million in unpaid legal bills.

Add
that to the more than $140 million in court judgments and tax liens against the
Harvard-educated fallen finance whiz and his fund, and you have one of the
oddest Wall Street stories in recent memory.

While
Fletcher owns three apartments in Manhattan’s exclusive Central Park West
Dakota co-op, an $8.85 million self-described castle in Connecticut’s tony
Litchfield County, and, with his wife Ellen Pao, a $1.5 million San Francisco
home, the ex-hedgie stands accused of cheating Massachusetts and Louisiana cops
and firefighters out of more than $100 million and not paying close to $3
million in taxes.

The
pension plan of the public employees had invested in Fletcher’s hedge fund,
Fletcher International, before that fund crashed and burned in 2012 amid a
series of questions concerning the whereabouts of the cash.

A court in San Francisco found against Ellen Pao. But, being
married to a man who stands accused of defrauding police officers and
firefighters in two states… it’s not a good thing.

As for Pao’s discrimination case, in today’s Wall Street
Journal Heather MacDonald argues that the Pao case is just a small part of the
feminist assault on the high tech industry.

There is a pungent irony here. The most affluent liberals in
the nation are being hoist on their own petard. Considering the extent to which
the titans of tech promote leftist causes, one does feels little empathy when
they have to defend themselves against feminist lawsuits.

MacDonald is less than optimistic about the future:

This
triumph of common sense [in the Pao lawsuit], though, represents merely a minor
setback in the feminist crusade against America’s most vibrant economic sector.
The chance that Silicon Valley can preserve its ruthlessly meritocratic culture
under a continuing feminist onslaught is slim.

To reprise a point I have occasionally made, it is in no one’s
economic self-interest to discriminate against qualified candidates. The
marketplace will inevitably extract a high price from those who do.

MacDonald says:

Ms.
Pao’s suit is a perfect example of the feminist vendetta against Silicon Valley
companies. That vendetta is based on the following conceit: Businesses refuse
to hire or promote top-notch employees who would increase their profits, simply
because those employees are female. Reality check: Any employer who rejects
talent out of irrational prejudice will be punished in the marketplace when
competitors snap up that talent. For the feminist line of attack on Silicon
Valley to be valid, every tech firm would need to be conspiring in an
industrywide economic suicide pact.

As I have put it, if those who believe that business
systematically discriminates against equally qualified candidates, for any
reason whatever, get together and hire those candidates, they would easily
outcompete those who discriminate.

Given the current cultural environment, high tech companies
in particular would love to hire as many female employees as possible. They
might only do it for the PR or to forestall lawsuits, but surely if they could
afford to do it they would.

In MacDonald’s words:

Even
leaving aside market pressures, the claim that any high-profile company today
would discriminate against highly qualified females defies political reality.
Every elite business is desperate to hire and promote as many women as it can
to fend off the gender lobby. Women who deny that their sex is an employment
asset are fooling themselves.

When you see the world through the lens of your ideology,
you will blind yourself to reality.

She continues:

But in
a sign of how irrational Ms. Pao’s view of the world is, she has now positioned
herself as a martyr for Silicon Valley’s allegedly oppressed Asians as well as
its females. “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and
minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” she said after
her courtroom defeat. Never mind that Asians are overrepresented in Silicon
Valley and at Kleiner Perkins, compared with the national population, thanks to
their talents, not least in science and engineering.

Identity politics has already inflicted significant damage
on the American university system. Schools went on a hiring binge to fill its
administrative ranks with diversity bureaucrats. In the meantime, teaching jobs
disappear and young scholars are forced to work as low-wage adjuncts.

Fortunately for the schools, the adjuncts are so politically
correct that they never question where the money is going and whether the
university’s money might be better spent on education.

For now, no one spends very much time thinking about the
economic cost—in inefficiency and distraction—of identity politics. No one
seems to care about whether it will make America more or less competitive
against other countries.

McDonald offers a “modest proposal” to solve the problem.
Inflict the same handicap on the foreign countries that send their children to
study at America’s best science and technology schools:

All
else being equal, any economy that can escape the clutches of identity politics
will enjoy a vast advantage. As an insurance measure against future competition
from still-meritocratic cultures, perhaps the U.S. should institute this rule:
For every foreign scientist we train in our graduate schools, the scientist’s
home country must enroll another of its students in an American gender-studies
department—who would then be sent home to enlighten the populace in the nuances
of gender equity. That would
level the playing field.

J. R. Dunn has written one of the best psycho-biographical
shapshots of Hillary Clinton, so I will quote it liberally, without adding much commentary.

After a quick run-through of Clintonian corruption and
amorality, Hillary and her husband’s ability to get away with things that would
destroy any other politician, Dunn arrives at the present day.

As a presumptive presidential candidate, Hillary has not
been doing well. In fact, she has been doing rather poorly.

Dunn explains:

No, the
simple fact of the matter is this: Hillary is tired.

It’s
hard work being corrupt. We see this in the rulers of the high medieval period
and the Renaissance -- prematurely aged kings, doges, and electors retiring to
country palaces and whiling away the days while ignoring their domains because
they just didn’t have it in them anymore.

I first
noticed this during the Benghazi hearings. Most took her infamous outburst as a blast
of pure venom, the words of a Messalina who was going to have these people in
the arena facing barbarian gladiators by this time tomorrow. But it didn’t
strike me that way. I saw it instead as an outbreak of petulance, the words of
someone pushed past the point of endurance and simply too weary to control
herself any longer. I still think so.

I, among others have suggested that Hillary will not be the
Democratic Party nominee. Dunn adds a nuance. Even if Hillary runs she will not
be running a full-on campaign.

For one, she is tired.

For another, she believes that the country owes her the
presidency. Why should she have to struggle to win it.

In Dunn’s words:

Hillary
is not going to run for president. Oh, she may put her name up. But run, as in the sense of actually
campaigning, that’s another story altogether

There have
been times that I’ve felt serious pity for Hillary. All of her efforts -- all
the bullshit, all the lies, all the public posturing -- have been so plainly
carried out to make up for an empty life. A life spent with a man who simply
could not control himself and valued her not at all. Consider how many times
she picked up the phone only to hear a hangup, how many strange perfumes she
smelled, how many stains she found on Bill’s clothing. Consider what such
knowledge -- particularly knowing that it would never end -- would do to a
normal woman. Then think for a moment of what it would do to someone like
Hillary. It would touch a heart of ice.

Because
it’s over. She will “run,” in the vaguest sense of the word. But it will all be
half-hearted, pure theater and nothing more. She will slough off debates,
perhaps even skipping them altogether. She will isolate herself, attempting a
kind of Garbo campaign, hoping that her “stature” will do the job for her. She
will trudge on, expecting that the presidency will be given to her. Because she
deserves it. Because she has suffered for it. Because she is Hillary.

What then, you ask? What will happen if we (again) make someone who is manifestly incompetent president because we want to
feel good about our purified souls?

Dunn takes the measure of the situation:

At a
critical time the chickens unleashed by Obama over the past two terms will be
homing in -- war in the Middle East, Iranian nukes, the inevitable Obama
recession. She will be in no state to handle it. Not any of it. The sine wave
tracking American politics over the past half-century is clear: Democratic
presidents take office only to drive the U.S. up against the wall and are
succeeded by Republicans who act to repair it, only for a new Democrat to
appear to resume demolition. With no repair work accomplished and a tired,
embittered, and beaten old woman in office, we will be in for some real
history.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery when the
imitator does not know he is imitating?

I ask this because I assume that Ross Douthat did not get
the idea for his latest column from this blog. Then again, you never know.

Whatever the case, his title, “The Method to Obama’s Middle
East Mess” resonates well with my own post about “malign neglect.” In that post
I recalled the famous line by Polonius about Hamlet:

If this
be madness, yet there is method in it.

I grant that Douthat did not use the method/madness meme. He
should have. Saying that there is method in the mess is awkward and clunky. It
feels as though he was trying to avoid using the vastly superior Shakespearean
phrase.

For my part I think that malign neglect has a nice ring to
it. I would add with commenter Jim Sweeney that we need to understand that
Obama wanted to be a transformative president. That means, a president who will
make lasting and even drastic changes, the kinds of changes for which he will
long be remembered.

Unfortunately, you can be long remembered for changing
things for the worst. Being transformative does not mean that you are
necessarily advancing the public good, or any good for that matter.

For his part, Douthat does not see a method here. He sees an
administration that is simply lost. Events exceed its ability to manage them:

This
administration has been persistently surprised by Middle East developments, and
its self-justifications alternate between the exasperated (why don’t you try it if you’re so smart?)
and the delusional (as soon as we get
the Iran deal, game changer, baby!).

People who defend Obama’s policy do not call it malign
neglect. They call it ”offshore balancing.”

Douthat summarizes it:

In an offshore
balancing system, our
clients are fewer, and our commitments are reduced. Regional powers bear the
primary responsibility for dealing with crises on the ground, our military
strategy is oriented toward policing the sea lanes and the skies, and direct
intervention is contemplated only when the balance of power is dramatically
upset.

One hates to sound pedantic—not that much—but,
as concepts go “offshore balancing” is incoherent. It is not as clear and
intelligible as the “pax Americana” policy it replaced. And it does not reach
the level of coherence enjoyed by the policy of containment.

For people to have confidence in your policy they must
understand it. For your staff to implement your policy they must know clearly
what it does and does not prescribe.

In a situation where our allies believe that, at best the
Obama policy is incoherent and at worst it is trying to shift power in the
Middle East toward Iran, they are more likely to start taking action on their
own. A ship without a rudder—an image for the current situation—will soon run into trouble.

Those who defend offshore balancing do not seem to be in
very close touch with reality, either.

Douthat describes their thinking in terms that suggest that
they have no idea of what is going on in that part of the world. It’s
embarrassing:

Our
withdrawal from Iraq and light-footprint approach to counterterrorism, our
strange dance with Bashar al-Assad, our limited intervention against ISIS —
they all aim at a more “offshore” approach to the
Middle East’s problems. Likewise, the long-sought détente with Iran, which
assumes that once the nuclear issue is resolved, Tehran can gradually join
Riyadh, Cairo and Tel Aviv in a multipolar order.

He continues:

So
offshoring American power and hoping that Iran, Iran’s Sunni neighbors and
Israel will find some kind of balance on their own will probably increase the
risk of arms races, cross-border invasions and full-scale regional war. The
conflicts we have now are ugly enough, but absent the restraint still imposed
by American military dominance, it’s easy to imagine something worse.

Douthat suggests one reason it cannot work. Led by Barack
Obama America does not even know who or what it is:

… it’s
very hard for a hegemon to simply sidle offstage, shedding expectations and
leaving allies in the lurch. And when you’re still effectively involved
everywhere, trying to tip the balance of power this way and that with
occasional airstrikes, it’s easy to end up in a contradictory,
six-degrees-of-enmity scenario, with no clear goal in mind.

The result, by Douthat’s reasoning. The administration is
hellbent on getting us out of the Middle East, regardless of the consequences.
One suspects that in this as in many other areas Obama is running out the
clock.

His motto should be:

Après moi, le deluge.

[Note for those who care about such things. The French phrase comes to us from Louis XV. The French king's most famous mistress was one Madame de Pompadour. Yesterday I participated in a discussion with three friends-- Mikkel Borch-Jacobson, Jacques van Rillaer and Jean-Pierre Ledru... led by Sophie Robert... about why we all took our leave from psychoanalysis. The discussion, which was filmed, took place in the antechamber that used to belong to Madame de Pompadour. It warms your heart, doesn't it?]

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Jay Solomon and Gerald Seib seem almost to feel sorry for poor Barack Obama. In so doing they are adopting the party line: the situation in the Middle East is so complicated that no one could manage it.

They explain:

The Middle East has descended into a state of disarray unusual even for that troubled region, imperiling PresidentBarack Obama’s policy dreams and leaving him with limited ability to control events.

That means the Obama administration finds itself in a highly awkward position: It now is lined up against Iran in Yemen. Meanwhile, it is trying tonegotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran and is working on the same side as the Iranians to defeat Islamic State fighters in Iraq.

Moreover, at this moment of high regional anxiety, Mr. Obama finds histies to Israel and Egypt, two traditional bulwarks of pro-American sentiment, under great strain. And his dream of smoothly exiting the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered a double blow this week as U.S. planes had to spring back into action in Iraq in an attempt to push back Islamic State forces, and Mr. Obama agreed to keep in Afghanistan thousands of troops he had hoped could leave by year’s end.

The upshot is that Mr. Obama is engaged in a juggling act, trying to keep aloft a nuclear deal with Iran, the fight against Islamic State and an effort to prevent Yemen from sliding into hostile hands—all without the kind of military presence or solid phalanx of loyal allies the U.S. once had at its disposal.

The esteemed journalists fail to notice that President Obama is the one person who is most responsible for the mess.

After all, his policies produced it. His surrender in Iraq produced part of it. His mismanagement of the Arab Spring helped advance it. His petulant attacks on Israel moved it along. His betrayal of an ally showed that he could not be trusted: His willful drive to make a deal, any deal with Iran contributed mightily to the problem.

Now, the situation is out of control. Our allies no longer trust us and our enemies no longer fear us.

It’s what happens when America elects as president a man who has no experience in foreign policy and who acts as though the real world must fulfill his dreams, or the dreams of his father.

For my part I have doubts about the inevitability of a Hillary Clinton presidency, but I have been wrong before.

If, perchance, you need to prepare yourself for a new Age of Clinton, George Will offers a primer:

The [Democratic] party, adrift in identity politics, clings, as shipwrecked sailors do to floating debris, to this odd feminist heroine. Wafted into the upper reaches of American politics by stolid participation in her eventful marriage to a serial philanderer, her performance in governance has been defined bythree failures.

Will is referring to Hillary’s attempt at healthcare reform, her handling of the Russian reset and her management of the Obama administration Libya policy:

He explains it all with a psychological evaluation, one that I have often repeated:

These episodes supposedly recommend a re-immersion in Clintonism, a phenomenon that in 2001 moved The Post to say, more in anger than in sorrow, that “the Clintons’ defining characteristic” is that “they have no capacity for embarrassment.” This judgment was rendered as two episodes were demonstrating that the Clintons in power were defined by their manner of leaving it.

For the Clintons the rules do not apply. They live in their own amoral universe, protected by the media.

Recently, we have learned that Hillary wiped the hard drive of her personal server clean-- thus, destroying the historical record of much of her tenure at the State Department. As Republicans have noted, even Nixon did not destroy the tapes.

The material, we posit, was suffiently embarrassing for her to believe that the hit she would take for erasing the files would be less than the hit she would take once people found out what was in them.

One might ask now whether she was trying to hide professional incompetence or personal dereliction, or both.

Hope dies hard. Psychoanalysis has gone the way of alchemy, but an intrepid band of loyalists believes that it can make a comeback.

In itself this is a bad sign. If people are wishing for your comeback, that suggests that you have nowhere to go but up.

I will save the debate on the clinical effectiveness of psychoanalysis for another time. For today I want simply to consider the PR hit that Freud and psychoanalysis took in today’s New York Times book review.

Tasked with reviewing Jeffrey Lieberman’s book Shrinks, Natalie Angier, the Times science correspondent recalls her own experience of orthodox Freudian analysis:

One of the most miserable experiences of my young adulthood, in the mid-1980s, was the year I spent in formal Freudian psychoanalysis. How well I remember lying on that uncomfortable couch with its built-in simulacrum of a pillow, as I struggled desperately to just “let my mind go,” to free associate, to disinter childhood memories or impulses that might prove remotely useful to me or at least satisfy my psychiatrist, who often seemed to be picking distractedly at lint on her skirt. She was a brilliant woman, no doubt about it, yet I always left her office feeling like a failure, and the science writer in me couldn’t help wondering, Where is the clinical evidence that this excruciating and expensive ordeal really works?

Folks, this is the New York Times. Its science writer is calling psychoanalysis an “excruciating and expensive ordeal.” Excuse her pragmatism, but she is asking if there is any evidence that it works.

She finds an answer in Lieberman’s book:

… the evidence, quite simply, doesn’t exist. Whether for the treatment of relatively mild afflictions like my dysthymia, or for serious conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or depression, psychoanalysis never had much, if any proof of efficacy. Yet the Freudian conceit that repressed desires and conflicts were the source of mental illness, and that talking those urges out of hiding could lead to a cure, dominated American psychiatry for over half a century, Lieberman says, stranding the field in “an intellectual desert” from which it has only recently emerged. “Sigmund Shlomo Freud,” Lieberman writes, was “simultaneously psychiatry’s greatest hero and its most calamitous rogue.”

How did Freud deal with the fact that psychoanalysis could not provide evidence to suggest that it worked: First, he attacked anyone who questioned him. (My Lacanian friends have made this into an art form.) Second, he transformed psychoanalysis into a “petrified religion,” or what I more correctly called a pseudo-religion.

Angier writes:

Freud knew he lacked evidence for many of his “daring ideas about mental illness,” Lieberman says. Yet rather than conducting research to fill in the gaps, he instead began attacking anybody who questioned him. “He demanded complete loyalty to his theory, and insisted that his disciples follow his clinical techniques without deviation,” Lieberman argues, thereby “fossilizing a promising and dynamic scientific theory into a petrified religion.”

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Here we are again, at the point where public health intersects with psychiatric illness and individual rights.

Apparently, Andreas Lubitz, he mad co-pilot of the Germanwings plane that crashed into a mountain in Southern France suffered from severe mental illness. As the story is now being presented, Lubitz chose not to inform his employer that he had been declared unfit to fly.

But why, pray tell, did someone charged with the safety of passengers have the choice?

Apparently, German privacy laws prevent psychiatrists from informing an employer of a patient’s condition.

And yet, his illness was anything but a mystery. A French newspaper, Le Figaro, reported this morning that Lubitz's instructors at his flight taining in Phoenix had declared him unfit to fly. His psychiatric history should have been well known to his employer. Since German privacy laws allow psychiatrists to breach confidentiality in some cases, one wonders why this did not count as one of those cases.

It also seems clear that Lupitz had been taking psychiatric medication. Whether he was on or off his meds I do not know. But oughtn’t we to recognize that these medications, whatever their virtues and value, are of limited usefulness. Since Lupitz was clearly not a everyday depressed patient, ought we perhaps to redefine what we mean by treatment in such cases.

As for the question of motive, the New York Post offers this insight:

The stunning revelation came as a German newspaper quoted another of Lubitz’s ex-girlfriends recalling that within the past year, he had promised her that one day he’d “make everyone remember him.”

The ex, identified by Bild newspaper as “Maria, 26,” also said Lubitz would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “We’re crashing!”

“When I heard about the crash, one thing that he said kept going through my head: ‘One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember it.’ ” the woman told the paper.

“I didn’t know what he meant, but now it makes sense.”

An anonymous individual, preferring infamy to anonymity, wants to make an impact, wants to be remembered, wants to change the system.

Everyone
experiences loss and setbacks. We are diagnosed with serious illnesses and
injured in accidents. We lose homes, jobs and loved ones. Yet even the most
traumatized often manage—over time and with help—to slowly piece together their
lives. It is a painful and rarely linear process, but it can strengthen people
in unexpected ways. Many are able to transcend their hurt by providing help to
others, and in doing so give direction to their waylaid lives.

Some people are more optimistic. Some people have better
social support networks. Some people refuse to let even a tragedy get them
down.

These
people tend to be optimistic—thinking things will work out—and are able to
accept what can’t be changed and focus on what can be, he says. They recognize
that even though they didn’t have a choice in their loss, they are responsible
for their own happiness.

When we ask how one can go about becoming more optimistic
and more positive, one way is to choose one’s friends well.

In Ansberry’s words:

For
example, people can develop a more optimistic view by cultivating friendships
with positive people and challenging negative thoughts.

Of course, there are traumas and there are traumas. When
Carolyn Moor, a young mother with two small children, lost her husband in an
automobile accident, her world fell apart. She herself nearly fell apart.

What did she do? Ansberry describes Moor’s way of dealing
with trauma:

She
went through the motions, getting her daughters out of bed, dressing and
feeding them, and volunteered at a grief group called New Hope For Kids. “I put
on a good face in public,” she says. Inside, she says, she was a wreck, not
sure of what to do with her life. She met other widows at the grief group but
didn’t know anyone who could show her how to move forward.

Evidently, Moor had responsibilities to her daughters. She
did whatever she could to make their lives as orderly as possible. She wanted
to limit the disruption they had experienced when their father died.

So, she went through the motions. In the therapy world,
people tend to believe that insight cures. In this case, going through the
motions and putting on a good public face constitute resilience.

She did not need to understand what she was doing or why she
was doing it.

Obviously, some people cannot go through the motions. Some people
refuse to do anything. Some people refuse to go out in public. One would be
correct to say that they are not resilient.

I would suggest that people who have strict and very regular
schedules must be more resilient than are those who do not. Those who have a
goodly amount of routinized behavior, behavior that feels automatic when it is
performed are probably more capable of continuing it even when they have
suffered a trauma.

Surely, it is also true that people who are directly
responsible for the well-being of others, who can perform their daily rituals
with an attitude of benevolence are more resilience than are those who focus on
their personal pain and grief.

This suggests that resilience involves the ability to
perform, to behave in a certain way, regardless of the emotional stress. It
does not resemble spiritual enlightenment as much as it resembles the training
that a soldier undergoes… the kind that will allow him to do his job regardless
of the stress.

If resilience involves tasks that need to be performed, it
can be undermined by doing the wrong thing.

Carolyn Moor had made one mistake in the aftermath of her
loss. As it happened, a rabbi helped her to correct it:

Rabbi
Boteach asked her to look at the choices she was making to see if they were the
best for her and daughters. One stood out. Every year on Valentine’s Day, the
anniversary of her husband’s death, she opened a memory box. Inside, along with
her husband’s watch and architectural drawings, was a stained sweater that she
had worn the night of the accident. It was, she reasoned, a way to honor her
husband by never forgetting the pain of that day.

Doing
so, though, left her—and her daughters—focused on Chad’s tragic end, rather
than their happy times together.

Keeping a reminder of a tragedy did not help her. It did
not, as the rabbi said, help her to focus on the good in the relationship. One object in the memory box was working
against her and she needed to release herself from its hold.

She also sold her house and did other things to put more
distance between her and the life she had lost.

Eventually, her mind caught up with her resilient habits. We
will say, for now that we do not know how this happened.

When you are learning how to play a game, you begin by going
through the motions. At some point you learn how to play the game and are said
to know how to do so.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

You’ve heard it before. You have probably nodded in assent
each time you have heard it.

Life, you have learned, is a trade-off. You can’t have
everything you want.

It’s a great idea. Mouth it and you will sound like a mature
adult.

And yet, once you start having to make choices—if you get
this you cannot have that—your mind will recoil in horror. Indignantly you will
respond that you should not have to make such choices, and besides, you can
have it all. In fact, you know someone who does. Or, at least you think he does.

Such were my first thoughts as I read Sahana Singh’s article
about the time she and her family spent in Singapore.

With the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern
Singapore, some media types have been jumping up to explain that while Singapore
is freer than anywhere else when it comes to doing business, it is an
autocratic horror when it comes to personal freedoms and first amendment
rights.

We Americans seem to believe that social customs should
become a free-for-all and that the business world should also be a
free-wheeling free enterprise paradise.

In truth, as Camille Paglia opined, American students have
become world leaders in decadence. She might have mentioned that America can
also be a rather dangerous place. Apparently, college campuses are especially
depraved.

All the while, American free enterprise is being stifled by endless
regulations. American millennials are lagging just about all
of their international peers in measures of competence.

Is that what the world looks like when you don’t make trade offs?

Singh describes her experience of everyday life in Lee Kuan
Yew’s Singapore. In particular, she notes that the Singapore described by Yew’s
detractors—mostly leftists who prefer socialism to free enterprise—is a rank
distortion.

She writes:

From
clean water and crime-free streets to reliable public transportation and easy
access to libraries, the state government anticipates all the basic needs to
provide its residents a good quality of life and eliminate the stresses that
can impede personal progress. But in the coverage that followed the death of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew
on Monday, Western media has painted a very different picture. They describe a crushing autocrat
that chained his people and stripped them of basic freedoms. My experience was
quite the contrary. Outside of this tiny island utopia, I never felt more free.

What was it like for a mother with a baby? Singh describes it:

In my
first days in Singapore, I worried about safely getting around town, especially
with a baby. I had never used local trains and feared ending up in a dangerous
neighborhood. But what would be reasonable fears for a newcomer in most
countries were gratuitous in Singapore. Everywhere were street signs and
directions in English, clearly marked and intelligently placed, as if invisible
planners were anticipating your next question. On my first try, I navigated to
Orchard Road, the nation’s retail hub, and back to my hotel without having to
ask anyone for directions.

There
was no litter in Singapore’s streets. Every building looked clean and every
walkway looked newly washed. The national library hadnumerous branches, stocked with
wonderful books. With my baby in a stroller, I could go practically anywhere.
It was like an India I had always dreamed of: clean, green and hassle-free.

Of course, Singh does not define freedom in terms of Spring
Break or the ability to get high and to pee in public:

There I
was, freer than anytime I had been in my life. I had just found a job I loved.
I could go see a movie with friends and return by myself late at night. I could
fall asleep in a taxi, after reeling off my address, and the driver would
safely take me home and gently wake me up. Singapore maintains an
efficient – if strict – judicial system, fundamental to living in a low-crime
society while practicing individual freedom. I had tasted the real
freedom that came with security.

Singaporeans pay a price for this kind of freedom:

Many
point to the price Singapore’s citizens and residents pay for achieving that
security. The government imposes strict laws with steep fines and
punishments for even minor transgressions: Breaching the ban on selling gum can
fetch a fine north of $70,000. Vandalizing property can lead to caning. These kinds of sentences may be an
affront to American ideals, but in Singapore, like many Asian countries,
ensuring the greater good is paramount to
self-determination. Americans, it should be noted, also pay a price for the premium they put on
individual liberties.

The government of Singapore is certainly autocratic. It does
not respect individual liberties and individual rights. It is decidedly
intolerant of criticism and dissent.

Yet, it allows people from different ethnic groups to live
and work together in harmony. Its schoolchildren regularly outperform America’s
best by all measures of academic achievement. And it has produced the kind of
place where you can bring up a child without being in constant fear. It does
not have gang violence or drug wars. It doesn’t even have transgendered locker
rooms.

Surely, Singapore is not an ideal society. Its people have also
made trade-offs… only the trade offs are different from the ones that we have
made.

Studying the Obama administration Middle East policy, one
can only conclude that it should be called: malign neglect.

After all, when you declare that retreat is an advance, that
surrender is victory and that you lead from behind, something seems clearly
wrong with your thinking.

It brings to mind a line from Hamlet. Spoken by Polonius,
about the melancholy prince, it is:

Though
this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.

Yesterday, as the remnants of the government of Yemen fled
the port of Aden, with Iran-backed Houthi rebels fast on their heels, the White
House declared that its Yemen policy was working.

Madness is when you take your delusions for reality.

In the meantime Max Boot, a distinguished foreign policy
analyst explains the method in Obama’s madness:

Boot lists the data points we should consider:

Data
point No. 1: President Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011
and is preparing to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2016, even while keeping a
few more troops there this year and next than originally planned.

Point
No. 2: The Obama administration keeps largely silent about Iran’s power grab in
Iraq, Syria and Yemen, even going so far now as to assist Iranian forces in
Tikrit, while attempting to negotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran that would
allow it to maintain thousands of centrifuges.

Point
No. 3: Mr. Obama berates Benjamin Netanyahu for allegedly “racist”
campaign rhetoric, refuses to accept his apologies, and says the U.S. may now
“re-assess options,” code words for allowing the United Nations to recognize a
Palestinian state over Israeli objections.

Put them together and you might get sick to your stomach.
But they do constitute a coherent policy:

Taken
together, these facts suggest that Mr. Obama is attempting to pull off the most
fundamental realignment of U.S. foreign policy in a generation. The president
is pulling America back from the leading military role it has played in the
Middle East since 1979, the year the Iranian hostage crisis began and the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan. He is trying to transform Iran from an enemy to a
friend. He is diminishing the alliance with Israel, to lows not seen since the
1960s.

Call it
the Obama Doctrine: The U.S. puts down the burden, and Iran picks up the slack.

What does a policy that supports Iranian hegemony look like?

Boot explains:

Mr.
Obama is also doing little to contest Iran’s growing imperium in the Middle
East, symbolized by the ubiquitous presence of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander
of the Quds Force, which is charged with exporting Iran’s revolution. Tehran
backs proxy militias such as Hezbollah, which has moved from its Lebanese base
to support Iranian client Bashar Assad in Syria; the Badr Organization,
which is leading the charge against Islamic State in Tikrit; and the Houthi
militia that has taken over San’a, the capital of Yemen, and is now at the
gates of Aden, a strategically vital port near the entrance to the Red Sea.

All
U.S. officials will say in response is that Iran’s actions are “helpful” as
long as they are not too “sectarian”—akin to praising Al Capone for
providing liquor to the thirsty masses while piously expressing the hope that
his conduct isn’t too criminal. Now the U.S. is even supporting the
Iranian-directed offensive against Tikrit by providing surveillance flights and
airstrikes for attacking forces.

To keep us up to date, in the absence of American leadership
Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched an attack on the Houthi rebels in
Yemen.

As everyone knows by now, Obama has turned away from Israel.

Boot explains:

The
flip side of this shift toward Iran is a move away from longtime allies, most
notably Israel, which views the Iranian nuclear program as an existential
threat. The president vowed to put some “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem,
and boy has he delivered. His aides deride the Israeli prime minister as a
“chickens—” and a “coward,” and Mr. Obama has exhibited more visceral anger at
Mr. Netanyahu than he has at Vladimir Putin or
Ayatollah Khamenei.

We’d be better off if it was just plain madness.

It’s going to take a long time to clean up the mess caused
by Obama’s malign neglect.